Itinerant writer Barclays will turn fifty-eight this weekend. He is going to celebrate them, or more exactly commemorate them, because they have been celebrating them for many years, at his mother's house, in the city where he was born. His desires are simple, austere: hug his octogenarian mother, hug his wife and his youngest daughter, eat lucuma ice cream as if there were no tomorrow. He would also like to hug his eldest daughters, but they will be far away and with good luck they will send him a short email.
Barclays is surprised to be so old. In his youth, addicted to marijuana and cocaine, it seemed unlikely that he would reach this old age. He could have died of a cocaine overdose, he could have burst his heart, it didn't happen. Years later, he became addicted to sleeping pills, particularly hypnotics. He would take ten or twelve tablets throughout a whole night. He could have died of an overdose, he wanted to die of an overdose, it didn't happen. Barclays has summoned death on several occasions, but it has not shown up, he has eluded it, he has stood up to it, luckily for him.
Why has Barclays mistreated himself so recklessly, played so recklessly with his state of mind, summoned the forces of evil, laid vicious ambushes on his health? Why, in short, has he despised his life, when he at first sight had everything? Why has he thought so many nights that living was a strenuous job and dying a deserved rest? The answer seems simple: Barclays learned to hate himself when he was a child, when his father hit him and insulted him for no reason. Since then, he has lived lame as his father was lame, soul crippled as his father was crippled, without self-respect as his father lived poorly. In other words, Barclays learned early to despise his own life: that was the origin of the cold in his heart.
How life itself seemed absurd, a cumbersome journey to nowhere, a buffoonery, a farce of misunderstandings, Barclays stuck to a noble custom that perhaps saved his life: escaping from harsh reality, from the cold itself in his heart , chasing fictions. As a child he fully believed in the religious fictions that his mother taught him, and thanks to her he was a pious, devout child, almost an altar boy. Of course, he made the first communion. But in adolescence, disturbed by his erotic desire, he stopped believing in religious fictions and refused to confirm in the Catholic religion that he had been baptized. Disbelieving in religious fiction, he fled to other fictions that seemed to him better, more credible, more credible, more persuasive, more beautiful, richer: literary fiction, artistic fiction. First he was a reader, then a writer. First he went to a movie buff, then to a desk. First he was a journalist weighed down by the heavy weight of the truth, then a writer.
It is not an exaggeration to say then that Barclays is turning fifty-eight years old thanks to the fact that he passionately gave his life, his whole life, his head, his heart, his entrails, his viscera, to the act of writing alone. If he were not a writer, if he had not published fifteen novels, he would surely be dead: the books he read and wrote probably saved his life, the illusion of writing a new book gave meaning to his existence, embellishing it, enriching it. Not surprisingly, Barclays will be presenting a novel in a few weeks. He does not know if it will be a success or a failure, if it will have many or few readers, if the criticism will be kind or impious, but the almost miraculous appearance of that novel, entitled "Los genios", published by the prestigious Spanish publisher Galaxia Gutenberg in Spain and America, multiplies his reserves of enthusiasm and recharges him with an illusion similar to the one he felt when he published his first novel thirty years ago.
Barclays will not talk about any of this with his mother on his birthday, because she does not read her son's books, does not notice or perceive her son's artistic zone, so that, before his octogenarian mother, Barclays is an underground writer , in the closet. What will Barclays and his mother talk about that summer Sunday in that city where they were both born? It is certain that she will speak of politics, of the poisonous issues of tribal, village politics, and her opinions will be tremendous, outrageous, apocalyptic: she is a woman of the religious right, she hates the charlatans of the left and her vision of politics is imbued with a deep aspiration to moral purity, to moral virtue. It is certain that, at the same time, Barclays will try to avoid the toxic issues of politics, but he will fail and end up being dragged into that mire, that swamp. Because what Mrs. Barclays would like is for her son to be a politician, not a writer. But he stubbornly resists those siren songs and thinks that if a writer gets into professional politics, he has failed, he has given up as an artist, he has thrown in the towel in his search for lasting beauty. Because in politics you will never find art or beauty, you will only find meanness and vileness, misery and abjection, felonies and betrayals. He always loses out of politics, he thinks.
At fifty-eight years old, and begging his deceased sister to protect him from the worst evils, Barclays no longer finds reasons to continue summoning death, to continue sabotaging his own life. Now he is a happy man, and not because he is fat he is less happy, and not because he avoids sports is he less happy, and not because he takes three pills for bipolar disorder is he less happy. In other words, Barclays is happy because he is fat, because he does not play sports, because he takes three pills to regulate his bipolar disorder. But mainly he is happy because he is in the place he has chosen with the people he has chosen. He has arrived on the island in paradise, or so he truly believes, every day of his blessed life. He loves his wife who is so much younger than him, he loves his three daughters, he loves seeing his youngest daughter every day, he loves his house, his neighborhood, his routine, he loves the calm and predictable life he leads, he loves the hours he spends to write, he loves to lie in bed at dawn and open an unfinished novel whose reading takes him on a walk, on a trip, without leaving home. Barclays then loved his life because it seems like a fictional life, the life of a literary character, a character who is always on vacation or traveling, a character who is not afraid of death, who keeps it well in mind, who when he has to take an important decision, for example, if he travels or not to spend his birthday with his mother, he wonders what he should do if this were the last year of his life, and then the answer is simple: he travels, of course he travels hug his mother already eat lucuma ice cream
As you are an agnostic, as you consider that accepting a doubt and letting it flourish is a sign of intelligence and strength, Barclays does not completely rule out that his mother's prayers, or those of his deceased sister who was a nun and a poet, have saved his life. life from a cocaine or hypnotic overdose, he does not rule out that the gods and saints and angels, if this exists, have conspired to extend his life a little longer. That is why he does not pray nor is he a believer, although he does talk to her sister and feels her present. Now Barclays is in no rush to leave, slam the door, let the curtain fall. He is in a hurry, yes, to write more novels, read more books, watch more movies, take more trips with the family. He is in a hurry to find beauty in art, and not in the world of power, money, and politics. He is in a hurry to love his wife as lovers love each other on the island of paradise: not with words, but with kisses. He is in a hurry, right now, as he travels to Madrid and Barcelona to present the novel "Los genios", which, he feels, is the most ambitious of his career.
Barclays observed in amazement that he was turning fifty-eight years old, when he used to say, cursed writer, misunderstood artist, that he wouldn't make it to fifty. Now it seems incredible to him, almost indelicate, rude, that he could live to be eighty years old. It would be a godsend to reach seventy, he thinks wistfully. I have twelve years left to write three more novels, they promise themselves. With great luck, I have twelve years left to live and I want to live them with this family, in this house, on this island of paradise, reading and writing. If I get fired from television, if the next twelve years I don't do a television program anymore, it contravenes the way that this disappointment makes me a plus writer and a happier man: it has to be possible, Barclays says to himself, suddenly, Who knew, optimistic, suddenly warm heart.
